As cofounder of Directors Lab North, the Toronto-based companion program to the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Evan Tsitsias has gathered an extensive collection of notes and insights pertaining to the craft of directing. In compiling some of that collection, Tsitsias has created a volume of knowledge that “covers all the relevant questions, ideas, and concerns that percolate each year during the Lab” (7). In the first section, chapters mirror some of the master classes, panel discussions, and guest artist interviews that Lab participants have experienced since the program’s inception in 2011. The second section, entitled “The Manual,” compiles the individual perspectives and methods of 10 years of Directors Lab participants, guest artists, and master teachers as they discuss and respond to the issues that contemporary directors often encounter. By compiling these details and a broad range of industry perspectives, Tsitsias has assembled a crucial volume of knowledge on the craft of directing.

In the second volume of his survey of contemporary “avant garde” theories and practices, editor Marc James Léger collects writings and artworks by contributors from a variety of artistic movements and cultural fields. As broad as the selected material may be conceptually, the contents of the book also vary greatly in form, including essays, poetry, interviews, lists, and manifestos. In order to frame this expansive body of work, Léger draws a distinction between the use of “avant-garde” as an adjective describing an aesthetic or quality and “avant garde” as a noun, which he defines as “an agent that challenges the destructive and exploitative aspects of capitalist social relations and that contributes to social emancipation” (9). By doing so, Léger upholds his belief in the progressive societal and social functions of the avant garde, and the material presented in this volume reflects those values.

Jennifer Buckley’s investigation of the developing relationship between performance and print questions the conventional notion of 20th-century avantgarde theatre as a post-text institution. Over the course of five case studies, Buckley examines some of the many ways that theatre and performance artists have engaged print as part of their work. The first two studies consider xylography, a printing technique that utilizes hand-carved woodcuts. One details how Edward Gordon Craig’s xylographic pamphlets and periodicals helped to “conceive, execute, and circulate the ideas for which he is still known” (20). The other examines Lothar Schreyer’s Spielgang, a performance notation that recorded actors’ activities, both visual and aural, in a mode reminiscent of staves in printed music. Buckley also examines how Judith Malina and Julian Beck of The Living Theatre circulated printed documentation of their text-averse performance pieces as a means for engaging with broad audiences and a commercial mass media. In the final two case studies, Buckley considers the medium of the artist’s book, focusing on the printed works created by Carolee Schneemann and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

In this thoroughly researched volume, Eric Mullis examines how pragmatist philosophy and interdisciplinary methods can inform the creation of dance theatre. To do so, Mullis details the research- and process-based approaches used to create his dance piece Later Rain (2015), an investigation of embodied spiritual practices of ecstatic Protestant congregations in the Appalachian south. Mullis also considers other dance works that engage ecstatic spiritual traditions, including performances by Doris Humphrey, David Parker and Lorraine Chapman, and The Wooster Group. In chapters dedicated to pragmatist theory, the history of ecstatic Protestantism, and the fieldwork and embodied research undertaken in the development of Later Rain, the book investigates the epistemological, ethical, and sociopolitical issues that arose throughout each phase of the process. Reflecting upon his research, Mullis asserts that “inter-disciplinary performance research plays an important social function in the context of a politically and culturally divided society,” and in this book he demonstrates the multifaceted theories and methods used to reach that conclusion (27).

Goran Sergej Pristaš, a cofounder and member of Zagreb-based performance collective BADco., presents here a collection of artistic notes, academic analyses, and other reflections on the philosophical and theoretical nature of contemporary theatre. Using his extensive experience as a dramaturg, BADco.’s research-based process of performance-making, and his master’s thesis research on Denis Diderot, Pristaš explores the insights, observations, and ideas that have fascinated him throughout his theatrical and academic career. Particular attention is paid to Diderot’s theory of theatre, especially his notion of the image and cinematic modes of creation and spectatorship. Pristaš discusses how this image-based notion of performance relates to BADco.’s work, deploying the notion of the “exploded gaze,” which he defines as “a gaze that demands additional thinking about what was seen” (212). Additionally, Pristaš examines, interrogates, and “explodes” the complex relationships between artistry and capitalism, between poetics and materialism, and finally between the immediacy of performance and the laborious process of artistic production.

This brief and elegant book collects some of Jan Kott’s writings on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, the series of works that began with The Dead Class (1975) and continued until after Kantor’s death in 1990, with the posthumous premiere of Today Is My Birthday (1991). Kott’s writing ranges from personal accounts of Kantor’s works penned in the 1980s to meditations on Kantor’s impact years beyond his death. Throughout, Kott carefully considers the relationship between theatre and death, reflected both in Kantor’s performances and in his own philosophical considerations of ephemerality. In a recurring metaphor throughout the work, Kott characterizes Kantor as Charon, the ferryman of the dead, vibrantly evoking how Kantor reanimates memory in order to let the dead live again within the brief window of performance.